Saturday, October 15, 2011

A look at DigitalPreservationeurope

Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access Through Networked Services) has released the first of four filmed and written studies to show how national libraries and archives in Europe are using Planets tools to preserve large and valuable digital collections. DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) fosters collaboration and synergies between many existing national initiatives across the European Research Area. DPE addresses the need to improve coordination, cooperation and consistency in current activities to secure effective preservation of digital materials.

Digital preservation is a set of activities required to make sure
digital objects can be located, rendered, used and understood in the
future. This can include managing the object names and locations,
updating the storage media, documenting the content and tracking
hardware and software changes to make sure objects can still be opened
and understood.

"Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions to
ensure access to reformatted and born digital content regardless of the
challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of
digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content
over time." (ALA 2007:2)

"The act of maintaining information, in a correct and Independently Understandable form, over the Long Term." (CCSDS 2002: 1-11)

"All activities concerning the maintenance and care for/curation of
digital or electronic objects, in relation to both storage and access." (Research Councils UK 2008: 6)

Essentially, DPE is concerned with preserving the digital world. Scanning and digitizing is only part of the solution to record preservation. Once the document, photograph, video or audio file has been created, there is still the issue of migrating and preserving the digitized files in formats that will be readable to machines in the future. Quoting again from the DPE website:

Digital objects are much more 'fragile' than traditional analogue
documents such as books or other hard copy mediums. Digital objects are
fragile because they require various layers of technological mediation
before they can be heard, seen or understood by people. Digital objects
are also much more venerable to physical damage. One scratch on CD-ROM
containing 100 e-books can make the content inaccessible, whereas to
damage 100 hard copy books by one scratching move is - fortunately -
impossible. A flash memory stick can drop into glass of water or get
magnetized, portable hard drive or laptop can slip from your hands and
get irreparably damaged in a second.

Digital objects require pro-active intervention to remain accessible.
While you can put a book on a shelf and return to it in upwards of 100
years and still open it and see the content as it was intended by the
author/publisher, the same approach of benign neglect to a digital
object is almost a guarantee that it will be inaccessible in the future.

Genealogists, especially those with huge investments of time and energy into large database files need to be not just interested, but obsessed with digital preservation. All this reminds me, it is time to migrate my files again.